Intro to Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan was a mostly-nomadic country until its next-door neighbor Russia came calling about 200 years ago. The country changed drastically in the 20th century as it became the USSR's chosen location for nuclear testing, for space launches, and for hundreds of thousands of political prisoners sent to work in the coal mines of the Soviet Gulag.
It has been an independent country since 1993.

• The population numbers 15 million.
• It is the 9th largest country in the world.
• Ethnically, the population is about half Kazakh and a third Russian.
• Religious loyalties lie fairly evenly split between Sunni Islam and Russian Orthodox Christianity.
• It has been independent from the USSR since December 16, 1991.
• It shares borders with Russia, China, Kyrgystan, Uzbekistan and Tukmenistan.
• It has great reserves of oil and iron.
• Nearly half of its exports go to its neighbors and trading partners, China and Russia.

It might be inauspicious to start a baby book by quoting the CIA, I suppose. But check out their World Factbook - here, specifically for Kazakhstan: what the CIA says about Kazakhstan.

More country information is available from the Kazakh Embassy in the US

And a daily feed of Kazakhstan news in English can be obtained from KazInform